Michoacan (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)
451-475 (477 Records)
El avance de los estudios arqueológicos realizados hasta el momento permiten delinear ya un panorama general de la historia prehispánica en Michoacán desde aproximadamente 1500 aC hasta 1522 dC. En esta ponencia presentaré una síntesis de dicha historia, vinculando la información de Michoacán a la de otras regiones colindantes con el fin de distintguir los rasgos particulares de diversas zonas pero identificando también las tendencias generales de desarrollo que se dieron a través del tiempo.
Understanding Food Production in Teotihuacan: New Approaches (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican and Andean Cities: Old Debates, New Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Teotihuacan was one of the largest and most prominent ancient cities in Mesoamerica during the Classic period (150-600 CE). The city housed an estimated population of 100,000 people at its height, all in need of food, shelter, and basic necessities. Spaces dedicated to the production and consumption of foodstuffs in...
Unveiling the Artisan Secrets of the Lapidary Goods from the Great Temple of the Aztecs (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Cultural and Biological Complexity in Mexico at the Time of Spanish Conquest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent studies have demonstrated that the cultural provenance and diversity of the goods found in the offerings from the Sacred Precinct of Tenochtitlan are more complex than the archaeologists thought, overlapping their acquisition by tribute, exchange, war prizes, or looting. In the case of the...
Urban growth and land use at Chicoloapan, an Epiclassic town in the southern Basin of Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The extensive surveys of the 1960s that culminated in Sanders, Parsons, and Santley’s pivotal 1979 volume put numerous archaeological sites on the map and advanced knowledge of the changing sociopolitical landscape of the Basin of Mexico through time. Data resulting from this work,...
Urban Landscapes in Late Postclassic Western Mesoamerica: A View from Angamuco, Michoacán (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Cultural and Biological Complexity in Mexico at the Time of Spanish Conquest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When Cristóbal de Olid arrived in Tzintzuntzan, Michoacán c. 1522 CE, he encountered the powerful king (irecha) of the Purépecha (Tarascan) Empire who controlled approximately 75,000 km2 of western and central western Mesoamerica. Never defeated by the Mexica, the Late Postclassic (1350-1530 CE)...
Urban Palimpsest Landscapes: Interpreting the Teotihuacan LiDAR map (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Journeying to the South, from Mimbres (New Mexico) to Malpaso (Zacatecas) and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Ben A. Nelson" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With 54% of the world’s population living in urban zones, investigating the nature and impact of urban centers has never been more relevant. Archaeology’s unique ability to reconstruct prehistoric urban systems across the long dureé makes the Pre-Columbian metropolis of...
The Usefulness of Institutional Analysis (IAD) for Defining Focal Action Situations in Mexican Cultural Heritage: PROCEDE-INAH and CONACULTA Outcomes after 1992 Reforms (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper analyzes how polycentricity governance is articulated around cultural heritage (CH) performance in an overview of changing contextual factors and focal action situation in Mexican Cultural System (MCS). This paper adds to conversation historical analysis from law changes across time in both countries, and also uses the Network of Adjacent Action...
Using LiDAR to Map an Ancient Purépecha Water Management System in ArcGIS (2018)
Recent applications of LiDAR technology at the Late Postclassic city of Angamuco, located in the heartland of the ancient Purépecha Empire in modern day Michoacan, Mexico are allowing for the identification and analysis of urban features in innovative ways. A complex system of constructed water management features consisting of reservoirs, sunken plazas, and connective canals were a vital form of infrastructure that were required for the movement of water across the dynamic landscape upon which...
Village to City: Formative Period Political Evolution in Central Mexico (2018)
Current research has prompted rethinking about the early development of sedentism, agricultural economies, and complex societies in Central Mexico. We discuss new evidence of significant interconnected changes ca.1000 BC that through multiple trajectories involved intensified maize production, expansion of sedentary villages, expanded interaction networks, and increased social complexity. With the establishment of the first cities, the Late Formative saw corporate political economy strategies...
War Milpas: Wetlands and Institutional Agriculture during the Late Postclassic in Tlaxcallan, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Antigua Cienega de Tlaxcala is an area of wetlands located at the core of the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley in central Mexico. Historically, these marshlands have been exploited agriculturally using drained field...
Water, Water, Everywhere, but You Need to Walk to Get a Drink: The Relationship between Water Sources and Teuchitlán Culture Sites in the Tequila Valleys of Jalisco, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study explores the relationship between several Teuchitlán Culture archaeology sites and their proximity to permanent and seasonal water sources within the Tequila Valleys of Jalisco, Mexico. Water is an essential resource that humans cannot live without. With a lengthy dry season of nearly seven months, questions arise regarding access to water and...
Ways of Death at Los Guachimontones (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Los Guachimontones was the largest site of the Teuchitlan tradition that flourished during the Late Formative and Classic periods (c. 300 BCE to 500 CE) in Western Mexico. The site exemplified the monumental architecture of the region - circular pyramid complexes and ball courts. Human burials have been excavated amongst these structures and at burial...
Wealth and Ownership of Indigenous Goods among Spanish Colonizers (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Material Culture of the Spanish Invasion of Mesoamerica and Forging of New Spain" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars have debated the relationship between ownership of indigenous goods among Spanish colonizers and different economic, cultural, and social variables. Some argue that wealth had a strong impact on consumption patterns, and wealthy colonizers used more European imports and less...
The Weapons of the Mixton War (1541-1542) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeologies of Contact, Colony, and Resistance" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The weapons used during the Conquest of Mexico have been described in ethnohistorical sources, both in documents written by the soldiers and in codices. The primary weapons described are steel swords, crossbows, cannons and the arquebus. From the Mixton War of 1540-1542, military material culture has been recovered from one of the...
Were-Jaguars, Birdmen, and Community Performance in the Rain Petition Ceremonies in the Caves of the Upper Balsas River, Eastern Guerrero, Mexico (2018)
In this paper, we address the role of leaders and their communities during the performance of ceremonies associated with rain petition in a network of caves located in the Mixtec-Tlapanec-Nahua region of Eastern Guerrero. We present newly discovered archaeological evidence in the caves of Pozo de Muerto, Casa de la Lluvia, Cauadzidziqui, Juxtlahuaca and Gobernadores de Techan, as well as ethnographic analogy to shed new light on the use of caves as arenas of ritual and political performance from...
What Lies between the Dots: Exploring the Archaeology of the Broader Basin of Mexico Landscape (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 2" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Basin of Mexico survey established a diachronic palette of settlement locations that has served as the baseline for a wide range of studies. But settlements only comprise the nucleus of the most visible form of past human activities. A wide range of activities, agrarian and...
What Once Was Lost, Now Is Found: Investigating the Relationships of Lower Dover in the Belize River Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located on the Belize River across from Barton Ramie, preliminary investigations of the recently discovered site of Lower Dover began in 2010. The primary foci of excavations were to situate Lower Dover in the sociopolitical landscape of the Belize River Valley. Initially, investigations focused on the monumental architecture of the site’s epicenter, as well...
Where is Camaxtli? Assessing the Iconography of Tlaxcallan Collective Government (2018)
Scholars have acknowledged, for many decades, that Late Postclassic Tlaxcalla (n1250/1300-1519 A.D.) was a state level political entity ruled by a form of collective government having Camaxtli as its main patron deity. Both conceptions are constantly reproduced in academic work although they derive explicitly from sixteenth century historical sources. Unfortunately, few works have undertaken the task of contrasting colonial writings against archaeological evidence in order to test if such...
Women and Ritual at Teotihuacan, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Teotihuacan is a complex multiethnic urban metropolis whose history is slowly becoming more nuanced after more than 100 years of research. Despite the recent attention that this Mesoamerican city has received, we still have many questions, among them, about the role of women, their life histories, their identities, and their role in the ritual...
Women Who Create and Feed the Gods: Female Priestly Work in Mesoamerica and the Andean Area (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper aims to study the role played by female characters presented in the Mexica and Inca religious hierarchy in a comparative perspective. In first case, we mention the cihuamocexiuhzauhque, the "women who fast for a year," (Mazzetto 2017, 2020) while in the second we refer to the acllacuna. The activities carried out by these ritual specialists...
Xanamus and Petroglyphs: A Study of the Construction Techniques of the Tzintzuntzan Yácata Lining System (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Looking to the West: New insights into Postclassic Archaeology in Michoacán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the prehispanic city of Tzintzuntzan there are architectural elements that form the main ceremonial center of the last capital of the Tarascan Empire. The best known are the yácatas, monumental pyramids of a mixed plan built on the Great Platform, characteristics of the Purhépecha culture. Used by the...
Xochicalco and Teotenango: New Approaches on Their Interactions (750–1150 CE) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Interactions during the Epiclassic and Early Postclassic (AD 650–1100) in the Central Highlands: New Insights from Material and Visual Culture" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the 1950s, Xochicalco (Morelos) and Teotenango (state of Mexico) have been constantly compared and assumed as two Epiclassic cities. The hypothesis of their contemporaneity and interaction is derived from their similarities in terms of...
Xochitécatl-Cacaxtla: Una ciudad dos veces abandonada (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican and Andean Cities: Old Debates, New Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El tema del abandono de las ciudades arqueológicas, se ha tratado en muchos estudios, pero en este caso la particularidad es el “retorno”, en Xochitecatl-Cacaxtla se identifican dos periodos de ocupación, el primero de 800 aC a 200 dC, y el segundo del año 650 dC al 950 dC. La causa del primer abandono fue la erupción...
Years to Remember: Another Look at Teotihuacan’s Calendrical Signs (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Teotihuacan: Multidisciplinary Research on Mesoamerica's Classic Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We offer a new look at a series of carved monuments and examples of rock art from Classic Teotihuacan culture (ca. AD 100–500) of highland central Mexico, all of which bear single calendrical dates in the 260-day calendar. Monuments such as those of Cerro Xoconoch and the Plaza de las Columnas serve as records...
Zapotitlan Earth Ovens and Their Middens: Ethnoarchaeology in Colima, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Earth-oven processing of agave food and drink has a time depth in Colima, Mexico, of more than 7,000 years, providing a notable example of localized socioeconomic intensification processes throughout the Holocene. The cultural setting for this research is observant of contemporary Agave Culture, a term used to describe...